00:01Well I'm here to talk about something not quite so glamorous and it's not sunshine. Accuracy.

00:06And accuracy is important and that's why you need volunteered geographic information.

00:13Doesn't sound quite right, does it?

00:14What's a surveyor doing talking about accuracy and a bunch of guys running around with cell phones collecting information?

00:20Well if we believe the currency and correctness and completeness are forms of accuracy, then we all need VGI.

00:26We need accurate information to get the efficiencies out of our systems.

00:31We need accuracies to expand the uses.

00:33And we need accuracy just to get the right answer.

00:36So accuracy is improving at a rapid rate in all forms of data.

00:41So let's look at a parallel.

00:45How accurate is this?

00:46Eons ago you want to meet for a beer at 3:00.

00:49This is what we had.

00:50Good to about 20 minutes on a sunny day and in the daytime.

00:56And not everybody had one.

00:58So we put them on the walls of public buildings and churches, so it kind of brought us together little bit as a community.

01:02We're beginning to synchronize and get some efficiencies from time.

01:06And as technology progressed, we built pendulum clocks.

01:09Want to meet for 3:00 at the community pub?

01:12No problem.

01:13Good 24/7.

01:14Even multimedia, had chimes, right?

01:16So we really gained a lot of efficiencies through this synchronization.

01:22And we could even meet after dark, right, because it worked after dark.

01:27At this same time, for a couple centuries from about 1500 to 1750...

01:31...the Europeans were crashing ships into the east coast of the Americas, and they were losing thousands of ships.

01:37They couldn't calculate longitude.

01:39Actually, Sir Isaac Newton thought that longitude was not a calculable thing, it's a function of time.

01:46But pendulum clocks were fixed.

01:48The most important invention at the time was the Harrison clock.

01:51This is the H4 that's revolutionized navigation.

01:54It revolutionized time.

01:55It allowed us to take time from being fixed and we could...it was now portable.

02:00This actually ended up becoming wristwatch and all kinds of things.

02:02Technology was going from a pendulum to a clock spring.

02:06Huge change.

02:10The next change is the Casio watch.

02:14This is when we went from a mechanical device to a digital device.

02:19It's hard to think about any piece of electronics right now without a clock on it.

02:24It's just a little chip.

02:25It's just a little piece of electronics, faster, cheaper, better, smarter.

02:28Just the whole way electronics goes.

02:32GPS is the Casio watch of positioning.

02:36Right now, we can do subcentimeter worldwide in real time.

02:41Devices are getting smaller.

02:42They're getting cheaper.

02:43They're getting easier to use.

02:45We're attaching GPS to everything.

02:48It's in our phones of course.

02:50Nokia owns all the patents to make our phones good to 10 cm.

02:56What happens when the accuracy of the phone is better than your basemap?

03:02What happens when everybody's phone is better than your basemap?

03:06What do we do?

03:07We can't remap.

03:09It's too expensive and we don't have the time.

03:12So what do we do?

03:14We need to build incremental improvement of accuracy into our daily workflows...

03:19...and using all different types of data, lidar, imagery, even volunteered geographic information.

03:25So let's take a look at an example.

03:28County does a new ortho project, 6-inch positional accuracy, 3-inch pixels.

03:32Pretty good stuff.

03:34Parcels don't overlay.

03:35We're not going to go remap the parcels.

03:37But we can harvest the measurements from those parcels and build a measurement network...

03:41...to improve the parcels and synchronize them with the orthos.

03:46We can actually take the information from that synchronization and use that to control the accuracies of other features in GIS.

03:53We have time/date stamps and we have feature-level metadata.

03:57So we have a lot of tools in the toolbox to build these workflows to keep ahead of the improving accuracy.

04:06Alright, now let's look at another example here, everybody's favorite, sewer manhole.

04:11Who has the most accurate information on this manhole?

04:16Well the engineer has the rim to about a hundredth of a foot which is about an eighth of an inch...

04:19...so you don't go thump, thump when you drive over it.

04:22He also has the inverts or the flow lines so things flow the appropriate direction.

04:27Now the public works director has a mapping location, and he's got inspection reports, and he's got construction specifications...

04:34...he's got all kinds of information on this manhole.

04:38But who really has the most accurate information on this manhole?

04:41The manhole cover was stolen.

04:45This is a hazard, it's a liability, and it needs to be fixed immediately.

04:51Guy walks out his front door, picks up the newspaper, and takes a picture with his GPS phone.

04:58Who has the most accurate information on that manhole?

05:03So as GIS professionals, we need to think about aggregating all types of data together...

05:08...and we need to think about our workflows to increase to our daily work the accuracy of our data.

05:16It's not authoritative data versus volunteered geographic information...

05:20...it's authoritative data and volunteered geographic information.